more easily embedded into larger projects as they do not
contain extra hardware that full-blown development
boards contain. How about including an FPGA chip on
your own printed circuit board (PCB)? This can certainly
be done, but is somewhat challenging and thus not
recommended for beginners.

The majority of FPGA ICs are high (and extremely
high) pin count devices, often in hard to solder packages
such as ball grid arrays. Their dense pin placement calls
for considerable skill on the part of
the PCB designer. Added to that is
the fact that FPGAs often require
multiple supply voltages with many
power supply pins that need to be
individually bypassed to ground.

FPGA PCB traces are narrow
and require extreme care during PCB
layout if proper operation has to be
guaranteed at high frequencies. For
these and other reasons, PCBs
hosting FPGAs are considerably hard
to design, but can be an interesting
challenge for ambitious amateurs.

Final Thoughts

In this introductory two-part
series on FPGAs, we have only seen
a glimpse of all that is possible with
programmable logic devices. There is
a lot more to explore out there.

Several books and websites offer
help and guidance to FPGA users at
all experience levels. Chief among
these are FPGA manufacturer’s own
websites where one can get an
enormous amount of free learning
resources targeting all levels of
expertise; www.fpga4fun.com is a
popular website with several
introductory and mid-level projects
for hobbyists to build.

A very large number of helpful
learner-focussed videos are available
on You Tube. As for books, many are
available covering FPGAs, VHDL,
Verilog, and complete digital system
design with programmable logic as a
search online will reveal.

After some familiarity has been
gained with FPGA configuration
concepts through the use of a
development board/system software
combination, one can graduate to
some really interesting projects.

If you have not yet started using FPGAs, then this is
the right time to do that. The FPGA ecosystem has
matured to such an extent that many interesting devices
and development systems (together with abundant
support resources) are readily available to ease any
beginner’s way through the exciting world of
programmable logic. NV